BDNYC: "My hope is that enough Iowa Republicans will be too ashamed to publicly confess their support for Trump. I also hope Bernie tops Hillary"

I believe that the republican caucus-goers vote by secret ballot and it is only the dem side that votes by essentially clustering together and then forcing supporters of candidates who fail to meet some minimum threshold to vote for their second choice.

Drago said: "I believe that the republican caucus-goers vote by secret ballot and it is only the dem side that votes by essentially clustering together and then forcing supporters of candidates who fail to meet some minimum threshold to vote for their second choice."

Drago, that was a good book. I liked the story where Samuel Beckett used to drive Andre to school as a boy because Beckett's convertible was the only vehicle in town that could hold Andre, by putting the top down. He said they talked about soccer.

The early returns probably overrepresent smaller caucuses. Last time, Romney did better at the evry biggets ones. The returns may first come from smaller caucuses - especially any place people were anxious to get home because of the approaching snowstorm - also there will be fewer speakers because some candidates won't have arepresentative. Then should come big ones in cities. Then outlying ones where there too many inexperienced people.

The Democrats don't actually vote for anybody - they select delegates for the next level who are at least informally committed to some candidate, or maybe an Uncommitted group. That is actually what happens in every caucus in every state that has a caucus.

The Republicans, some cycles after Iowa became important because, starting in 1972, they moved the date of their caucus to before the New Hampshire primary, instituted a straw poll that takes place before the delegate selection.

The real news to me at this hour is that Hillary has just over 50% of the Dem vote. That's not a resounding endorsement of the next chosen one. Time for Bloomberg to step in.

It seems clear as the polls have indicated that the R's have a three way race. Perhaps NH will change that, but certainly there will not be a Bush Dynasty. I still think that Fiorina should be in the top tier based on talent. She isn't, and this is going to continue to be a really strange year.

With 62% of the caucuses reporting, Jeb Bush has a hair over 3000 votes, the Cuban-American he hates so much has 8 times as many votes and Ted Cruz and over 10 times as many votes.

As the Professor has pointed out, maybe it's time for Jeb to quit the race. Naw! He hasn't spent all the money he raised on TV ads that no one watches and plush hotel rooms and private jets. On to New Hampshire!

I know, I was looking at http://www.decisiondeskhq.com The website is a little behind.

Right now - I just refresehed it - it's at 69.8% Precincts Reporting. Maybe it is not so behind. The reporting must be centralized and moves ahead in quantum jumps. they may be slower in posting the latest updates.

The results seem to be about the same as before. Ted Cruz: 28.5% Donald Trump: 25.0%Marco Rubio: 22.4%

garage mahal: "Will be fun watching Trump shit all over Iowa after tonight"

Another "fun" posting!

It will certainly be more fun watching Trump do his thing that watching OWS types actually defecate on police cars. For the People!

Speaking of Sanders (who garage has spoken well of), you have to positively love this from Investors Business Daily:

"Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner."

I again look forward to Drago's spot-on election forecasting as witnessed in 2012. Who can forget that Romney landslide, and all the fun posts describing his "modeling". Good times Drago, I hope you have that machine fine tuned and raring to go. Vroom Vroom!

Well Garage may be able to relate to Sanders. But what about Laslo? Sanders wrote stories about masturbation and rape for pulp magazines for $50 a pop--before he decided to leave honest work and go into politics.

Now a guy who can write stories like that might just be in Laslo's wheelhouse so to speak. But doing it on the cheap for $50 an article? Laslo does not like low priced competition.

So, in all my years of posting here you are going to go with that nonsense!

Well, you are doing the best you can with the "skills" you have so its hard to hold it against you. In the same way you cant hold it against a child when he says something pretty silly and nonsensical.

Next time you see Trump speaking on any formal occasion, check his makeup. He isn't really orange, and if you look around his eyes, the skin looks light blue because everything else is so orange/tan.

Oh wait; before I could even hit "publish," there he is. His face is damn near as red as his tie. Look at The Donald's face color in comparison to his kids'. Particularly the boys, sans makeup. The Trump ladies aren't exactly short on makeup, and they look perfectly natural next to The Donald.

“That’s the big question. Trump is a nontraditional candidate, and many of his supporters don’t have a history of going to caucuses,” said Tim Hagle, a University of Iowa political scientist. “He’s been trying to improve his ground game, but it’s been described as spotty.”

He started contacting people who had attended his rallies.

Eric: Secondly, if Trump was comfortably ahead in the polls on the election day and he was. He then gets smoked. What else would you attribute his loss to?

He wasn't smoked. Just did a few percentage points worse than he polled. The polls were more wrong with Marco Rubio, but, on the other hand, did detect a shift at the end toward Marco Rubio. Nobody could tell how far it would go, or whether or not it would reverse itself.

The polls aren't so good. It is very hard to do polling now. Less than 10% or so of people answer polls, now. It becomes an art to try to get a representative sample.

And they had to figure out how many people, and who, would attend the caucuses.

They still can get good samples by various methods. One idea might be to weigh it according to how people answer other questions with known results.

What are you talking about? Bernard Sanders has a 20-point or so lead in the polls in New Hampshire. There's no real reason for that to go away in the next week and a day. Vermonet is neighboring state and New Hampshire, Vermont and Iowa have the most liberal Democratic percentages (in polls of people who say they are Democrats I suppose)

New York Times: The Hillary Clinton campaign bought a nearly full-window ad on the caucus day home page of the Des Moines Register. Visitors to the website were greeted by an ad featuring her, with a quote from the paper’s endorsement of her last week. It also had links to the “find your caucus” part of her campaign’s website. The des Moines Register is Iowa’s largest newspaper.

I am certainly not one to agree with ARM (or necessarily the "conventional wisdom") but it does seem to me that my guy Cruz needed a bigger win out of Iowa than he got and I suspect it will boil down to Trump\Rubio as mr outside\mr inside.

In 1999/2000 Trump was running for the Reform Party (Perot's party) nomination. It carried with it some federal funding, I believe. He quit early. That contest didn't have anything like primaries, anyway. So these are his first votes for anything. I think.

Jeb Bush is going to run out of money soon and his donations have got to be drying up after his showing tonight and his poll numbers in New Hampshire. He's raised and spent a ton of money to find out Republican leaning voters don't want him as the nominee, something I could have told him for free.

It oooks like they'll have about half of the Iowa delegates. Sanders also congratulates Hillary Clinton for waging avery vigorous campaign and says O'Malley should know he contributed a lot to the dialogue and he gained a lot of respect.

People in Iowa have sent amesaage to the political establishment, the economic establishment and by the way the media establishment. Given the enormous crisis (?) it is too late for establishment politics - and complains about corrupt campaign finance system.

Talks about veterans - what hey were protecting was a democracy of one man one vote not billionaires buying elections. Overwhelmed by the fact millons of people have heped volunteer - 3 amd half million individual contributions. The average contribution was $27,

Nonsense. If Trump wanted a scream in support of his candidacy, he would hire the very best screamer. A fantastic one really. The best. The best of the best. The biggest, most luxurious screamer ever to grace the screaming community and this screamer would issue forth a scream so exquisitely balanced between sweet dulcet horror and maniacal exuberance that former Gov Dean, upon hearing it, would curl up in a fetal ball to await the merciful touch of death himself.

Donald Trump may know how to give good concession speeches. Maybe because he never really believed he would get this far - that could be why he always talks about the polls. Could be he's thought this through. (how to concede)

The Sanders Hillary thing reminds me of the town clerk in Wasau who held back town (Republican) votes till Milwaukee (Democrat) put in votes. And just dribbled it out so Milwaukee didn't know how much to cheat by, some said.Clinton is three votes ahead which is where she's been for hours.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

Wouldn't it be wonderful for you if anyone cared?

Oh well. I guess no amount of sleaze is sleazy enough for a guy who supports a candidate that intimidates people into voting by leafletting their voting records across the neighborhood. I guess that's what a law education's good for these days.

@wildswan These aren't votes. They are somebody reporting whom the delegates selected at the precinct caucuses are committed to.

With only two main candidates, there weren't too many delegate slots to "steal" or swindle people out of. A Hillary group was a 100% Hillary group and a Sanders group a Sanders group.

There wouldn't have been any putting of two groups together to get 15% except for O'Malley maybe with Uncommitted. They couldn't make a coalition and split two delegates - the non-Hillary non-Bernie group would get at most one in each place.

Some may have joined the O'Malley group on false pretences in order to be a delegate, but from what candidate the lost delegate came from would depend on some delicate math.

Can this be right? There are a total of 1344 voters in the Democratic caucuses (after 95% reported) The difference between Clinton and Sanders is currently at 4 votes. Santorum has received more votes than Clinton, Sanders, and O'Malley combined.

Wildswan, anyone can creep up on Hillary. Not surprising given her alcoholism combined with dementia (assuming hillarys younger amor huma can be believed).

I guess no lie or half-truth is flimsy enough for Drago tonight.

It speaks volumes about his politics to know that he has absolutely nothing positive to say about the candidate he supports, and only pant loads of negative nonsense about everyone else.

Seriously dude. What's it like when the only emotion you know is fear? Do you find people who think your resort to fear - not only as a last defense but as the only tactic - is admirable... or even meaningful?

One thing's for certain. If you're the type of person who's addicted to Xanax, Drago's got a credible political story to tell you.

I don't think America can be as easily scared as he thinks the commenters here can be. But maybe that's because I never saw myself as living in a nation of pussies and chicken littles.

Do you plan to vote for the soon-to-be-indicted Democrat or the Independent Socialist? For sake of accuracy, the second reference is to Bernie Sanders but I understand if you didn't immediately know which socialist I meant.

"This is the joke that Republican politics has turned into. "R&B..Yeah..kinda scuzzy eh?This type of approach was used in '08 with Obamites. Except they would come back to homes to reinforce the message. I have a friend who was doing it then and laughed uncomfortably about it.He was also disappointed that Obama didn't invoke executive actions more frequently...

Do you plan to vote for the soon-to-be-indicted Democrat or the Independent Socialist? For sake of accuracy, the second reference is to Bernie Sanders but I understand if you didn't immediately know which socialist I meant.

Keep changing the subject. A Cruz presidency would be an even greater disaster than the Second Bush presidency.

But don't worry. Everyone who knows him and works with him thinks he's an absolute piece of shit. So I'm pretty confident that the voter won't have any trouble finding out why that is and coming to agreement with them.

Unlike you, I can at least see Hillary's faults. You're too blinded with partisan bullshit to keep your own would-be tyrant in place, though.

But that's ok. You are not some singe-person embodiment of America. Believe it or not, there actually are people with more integrity and self-honesty than you have.

It's good to see the Cruz weasels come out of the woodwork with their Nothing-Positive-to-Say-about-Cruz campaign.

enjoyed how you skipped ...past Cruz outperforming the poll by nearly 6% or basically the same as Rubio.

No, the polls said he would be at 24% (but 7% below Trump's 31%) wile he actually came out at 28% - well, you are right, that is an increase of about 4%. Somehow I was thinking he was just above Trump, and that the difference was within the usual 2% or 3% or so margin of error of a poll.

I guess I have to admit it - I saw Cruz as lower.

Another poll, by the way, the Emerson poll, gave Trump 27, Cruz 26, Rubio 22, Carson 3, Paul 3, Bush 4, Huckabee 5, Kasich 4, Fiorina 2, Christie 3, Santorum 1. So that one had Rubio right, and Trump and Criz close to right also, but they had Carson all wrong for some reason.

The only reason Rubio hasn't taken off is that he gives off a bad vibe. Trump is the one who looks the part and it matters. Something, Something, charisma. Clinton, Bush and Obama had it. I'm not sure Rubio has it.

I made a mistake, but it only consisted of overlooking something, where I somehow thought that Cruz's percentage had remained roughly stable while Trump's and Rubio's had changed. No, Cruz's percentage went up too, somewhat, compared to the Quinnipiac poll. So where did the gains come from? I see now that the Quinnipiac poll adds up to only 97%, so 3 percentage points came from "Don't Know" or Undecided.

What I actually wrote wasn't wrong, except for not noting the possibility there might have been some Trump to Cruz switching - or maybe differences in turnout.

Live up to your own standards, "Rhythm and Balls", and tell me the great things about your preferred socialist.

I have before and I don't have to. But not tonight. You're too busy pretending to have something to feel good about and something worth celebrating in the win of your very-far-from-"least worst" candidate.

Once you get over your anger at being challenged to say one thing that's positive about the sociopathic liar Cruz, then we'll talk more.

He understands that the federal bureaucracy is the enemy of the people of the United States. He wants to end subsidies and corporate welfare, taking direct aim at the bureaucracies. He plans to unleash the ingenuity and creativity of the American worker from Leviathan's tentacles.

He understands that the federal bureaucracy is the enemy of the people of the United States. He wants to end subsidies and corporate welfare, taking direct aim at the bureaucracies. He plans to unleash the ingenuity and creativity of the American worker from Leviathan's tentacles.